Americans who served or worked in Afghanistan. How do you feel about it all now?

13 comments

1. Can’t speak for myself but my friend is really happy that he’s out of there and didn’t end up putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

   Suffice to say he doesn’t have fond memories.

   PTSD apparently sucks.

2. I served in the Marines 2007-2011 with a deployment in 2009.

   It just reinforces my belief that democracy is only held long term when the people fight and die for it. Someone else coming in and handing it to them makes them resent it. They have to believe in it and have sacrificed for it to have any meaning.

   All the money and military power in the world cannot make people care enough to fight for something they don’t believe in.

3. 2009-10, US Army.

   I can’t put together words that would explain how happy I am that no more American blood will be shed there, and that maybe there will be some semblance of peace for the Afghan people. I went over with billions and billions of dollars of support behind me and I felt extremely unsafe for the year I was there, I’m horrified at the thought of how helpless the Afghans likely felt getting caught in the cross fire of the whole 20+ year war.

   No one will ever impose anything on Afghanistan, if the Afghans want something different than the Taliban, only they can make it so.

4. I was there for all of 2012.

   I’m very happy we left, because even then we knew that we would have to “rip off the band-aid eventually.” But I absolutely despise the way we went about doing it.

   Tactically, it was one of the worst failures imaginable, with planning that seemed non-existent. I lost sleep about it at the time.

   I have interpreter and contractor friends (construction guys, mostly) that are still there, trying to get SIV’s but are stuck behind our bureaucratic wall. Turns out, scanners and internet access aren’t readily available for people in Afghanistan. Who knew? Not the state department, apparently.

5. USAF 2012. I was pretty broken up about it. We worked hard to protect our friends on the ground, and they gave up so much more than we did. Myself and my friends were heartbroken to see it fall so fast. My hope is that there’s an entire generation of Afghans that know a liberal democratic lifestyle and might fight to regain it.

6. I know we couldn’t stay forever but I’m not happy with the way the withdrawal was executed, and I feel terrible for all the people that risked their lives for us that were left behind. Am I surprised the government collapsed without us? Absolutely not. I love Afghans dearly but they culturally lack self-reliance and this was an example on a national scale, coupled with the fact that they didn’t believe we would actually leave. I am glad that we gave a generation of young Afghans a taste of what things could be like under a non-Taliban government. I hate the suffering that they are experiencing now, but I hope to see Afghans take steps to challenge the Taliban on their own. I’m heartened to see how many fathers are devastated that their girls can’t go to school and see that in itself as a cause worth fighting for. I will always hope for the best for the Afghan people.

7. Not personal experience, but that whole process was hard on someone I know who did a lot of diplomatic work there. They knew a lot of Afghanis that were terrified of the handover and pretty sure they would get hunted down for working with the Americans.

   It is a bad situation we couldn’t stay in and frankly the people that live there as a whole are not ready for democracy. They aren’t as a people broadly willing to do what is required to take it. If the people of Afghanistan wanted to stand up to the Taliban they could, but they don’t want to die so they don’t. I’m not putting a value judgement on it, nobody is obligated to pick up arms, but there is no shortage of nations that live under oppression because the masses won’t unify and put the tyrants in the ground.

   The Taliban claims to have 150,000 men. Even if I believed that, that is 150k men in a country of 40 million. You can’t control an unwilling population of 40 million with 150k shitkickers.

8. 10-11.

   I was saddened, worried about the Afghans I had worked with and gotten to know, and disappointed they weren’t able to hold, but I wasn’t surprised. The afghans did have good people in their military but it was hit or miss on how they well they functioned. Their commandos were awesome, engineers were competent, infantry was a mess, police were corrupt as fuck, leadership was greedy, a lot of their politicians were corrupt….

9. I don’t have any settled or coherent thoughts about the bigger geopolitical implications of it. At the time of the withdrawal I would hear or read something about how we needed to get out ASAP and should never have gone in and think, “Oh yes, that’s true” and then I’d read something from an opposite viewpoint and think, ”Oh yes, that’s also true.”

   From a personal perspective my experience there was certainly one of the most interesting and memorable in my life, which, I feel guilty admitting, makes me oddly nostalgic for it sometimes. Everything was heightened, for good and for bad.

10. 13-14. Army. Don’t care at all or think about it

11. I wish more people could see the comments made by former US service-members here.

12. I think I conducted myself well and also that it mostly doesn’t matter. I mean, that works of my roles are of no lasting consequence.

    The first tour my reports and analysis were extremely time-sensitive and more about information management. The second time I was producing detail engineering survey products for NATO that the current Afghan government is certainly not using.

13. I spent about a year there and I honestly don’t think about it at all. It was just a way for me to pay off my car.